This blog looks back at classic sports telecasts and announcers (primarily from the mid-1960s to present), provides DVR alerts for upcoming classic programming, and covers other historical aspects of sports media.

Sunday, June 19, 2016

I tracked the shots televised by Fox during the 4th round of the US Open. With the final pairing getting underway at 3:30 pm ET, I began the monitoring at 3:00 to provide a fair comparison to the other tournaments where I have performed similar Sunday tracking.

Fox showed 354 unique strokes during the tracking period. The final putt dropped at 8:16 so this worked out to 1.12 strokes per minute. This shot rate significantly trailed the 1.33 of the 2016 Masters on CBS. This was also a decrease from the 1.18 shown by Fox during its 2015 coverage of the US Open. Fox spent quite a bit of time discussing the controversy over the potential one-stroke penalty which was eventually applied to Johnson's score after the round, so that might explain part of the dropoff. (Note: From the 2016 Masters post, you can find links to the shot charts I compiled from the 2014 and 2015 majors).

Fox showed all but four of the strokes played by winner Dustin Johnson and all but four from third-round leader Shane Lowry. Fox showed just 20 golfers playing strokes. Nine players were covered for at least 15 shots. The highest finisher not shown during the tracking period was David Lingmerth who finished 12th.

Also notable: Fox went commercial-free for 52 minutes starting at 7:25.